BOOKS THE EARTHQUAK.E A Manhattan affair. BY LOUIS MENAND C orrine, the heroine of Jay McIner- ney's new novel, "The Good Life" (Knopf; $25), is an attractive, fortyish woman who lives with her husband, Russell, a book editor, and their young twins in a 10ft in Tribeca. They spend the summers in Sagaponack and they entertain in style, but they rent the 10ft, they don't own it, and they worry about money. Corrine quit her job as a law- yer to raise the kids, and she's trying to get back to earning again by work- ing on a screenplay based on Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter." She is vaguely dissatisfied with her marriage. Luke is a handsome, for- tyish man who lives in an expensive co-op on East Seventy-seventh Street with his wife, Sasha, a society beauty, and their unhappy teen-age daughter, Ashley. Luke has made millions on Wall Street, and is now "retired" and writing a book about samurai mov- ies, of which he is a fan. He, too, is vaguely dissatisfied with his marriage. No points will be awarded for guessing what happens. McInerney is sometimes thought of as a satirist, because he writes about a social scene that is a frequent subject of satire, the Manhattan Wasp haute bourgeoisie. But he is not a true sati- rist. He is not even a sentimental one. True satirists, though they have a lin- gering respect for wicked people, basi- cally hate everybody. Sentimental sati- rists-Tom Wolfe, for example-just hate the kind of people it is normal to hate: hypocrites, phonies, bullies, and narcissists. They have a soft spot for the innocent and well-meaning, so- ciety's victims-the sort of charac- ter that a true satirist, like Thack- eray, gleefully destroys. McInerney doesn't hate anyone. He loves his char- acters. He loves, in this new book, not only Corrine and Luke; he loves the hapless Russell (essentially a good guy whose ambitions are always run- 90 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 6, 2006 ning a little ahead of his talents) and the vain Sasha (essentially a sensi- ble woman whose appetites run ahead of her needs). He loves Washington, a cool black colleague of Russell' s who's a recovering alcoholic, and he loves Guillermo, a charming Wall Street pal of Luke's who's a clandestine cruiser of gay bars. He even loves the wretched / . -\ 1 , ""\ , '- \ , \} J' - .... " , f': \ 1 I .r I. f ' ,; - n " , /" , " . / ....Y' '\r. ß: ,'" [ (' i. .. \ ..: \ / " \ tf , o/,' {!;, . \ I . ,,(" ;-;, \., " ' I I {, , ,\ I( 1/' If ': y ,,:. '>) ' \ (" ., II "" ': / t ...- ",' "- I .. -,l. " ;;.., / "I J- \ \ ' "- J Jay McInerney Ashley, getting her out of rehab and onto a nice horse farm in Tennessee, where she prompdy renounces private-school depravity and devotes herself to good works and healthy living. We should all be McInerney characters! His peo- ple aren't bad; they're foolish, and folly can be redeemed. To make the plot churn and to provide a little moral contrast, there are a couple of vile un- redeemables in "The Good Life"-a "Lolita" -derived piece of Eurotrash, named Anton Hohenlohe, and a "Fatal Attraction" -derived succubus, called Trisha. Thackeray or Wolfe would have had extended sport with these two. McInerney can't wait to get them off the page. I t is a feature of the characters in McInerney's novel that they see them- selves as characters in a McInerney novel. This makes them depressed. Corrine knows that being a down- town mom trying to resuscitate her ca- reer by writing, or pretending to write, a screenplay is a cliché. Luke knows that all ex-investment bankers are sup- posed to be idly pursuing some sopho- moric project in the name of "personal growth." At a slightly dimmer regis- ter of self-awareness, Russell knows that getting seriously into cuisine (as he does) is just the sort of thing forty- something book editors do, and Sasha knows that drinking too much cham- pagne and flirting with paunchy ty- coons at East Side benefit dinners (as she does) is what aging fashion plates do. They're all in a bubble, and they feel it, but they can't get out. It is this noble but futile resistance to the types in which they have been cast that earns them their creator's affection. " T he Good Life" works hard to evoke the upper-middle-class Manhattan bubble, though maybe not hard enough. A lot of familiar names are familiarly dropped-Nobu, Babbo, Lupa, the Hamptons jitney, 740 Park, Abel Ferrara, Paul Auster, Nan and Gay, Salman-but, despite the glit- ter of currency, the cultural ozone is a little thin. This may have something to do with the fact that McInerney has spent a lot of authorial time with these people already. Corrine and Rus- sell and most of their friends are res- urrected from his 1992 novel "Bright- ness Falls" (no wonder they're starting to feel like characters in a book), and so are a few of the people in Luke's world. Allusions to people and events from "Brightness Falls" will be more meaningful to readers who remem- ber that book. A few of the scenes in "The Good Life" are, thematically, dead ends. And the prose, like the plot, occasionally sinks into conven- tionality, and we get patches of liter- ary cornstarch like this (about New York City): When had the dewy sheen of youthful exuberance hardened into the glossy shellac of sophistication? He knew it was partly his 1= fault, being seven years older, with ambi- tions of his own. The same thing happened, he supposed, to all of the eager boys and